


Words Sung in a Certain Order

by scarredsodeep



Series: Girl Out Boy [8]
Category: Fall Out Boy
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Divorce, F/F, Fall Out Girl, Femslash, Genderbending, Genderflop, Genderswap, Hiatus, I got divorced this year and this story is about that, Los Angeles, Motherhood, Nonbinary Character, Pat Stump Comes Into Her Own, Pete Wentz Figures Some Shit Out and Gets Braver, Polyamory, Soul Punk Era (Fall Out Boy), Tales from 2011, a little bit of secondary jo/andy vibes, but not just that, girl out boy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-03
Updated: 2020-01-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:27:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22094086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarredsodeep/pseuds/scarredsodeep
Summary: Hiatus-era Girl Out Boys. Girls have grown up into women. Adulthood is a goddamn mess.you were born into this world to take what you could out of it, and she did, she didn’t care, she wasn’t afraid
Relationships: Patrick Stump/Pete Wentz
Series: Girl Out Boy [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/940746
Comments: 19
Kudos: 58





	1. they always bring up how you changed

**Author's Note:**

> “It’s easy to convince people that you are really okay if they don’t have to actually hear what rattles you in the private silence of your own making. I sometimes imagine that this is what Pete was trying to say the whole time. Public performance as a way to hold yourself together until you could fall into what actually kept you alive in your secluded moments.”  
> \- Fall Out Boy Forever, Hanif Abdurraqib
> 
> [tunes](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3skAi5pmAKQv4zylQJRnJj)

Don’t look now, but Pete’s marriage is ending.

She’s trying not to think about it. Isn’t this the first time in her entire life she feels like she _gets it_ , like she’s grasped the _point_ of being alive and it’s an arrow slow-motion burying itself in her heart except instead of blood, it’s joy gushing out of her, it’s well-being melting through her fingertips and gilding her whole world? Isn’t it possible that she actually, somehow, possibly, _deserves_ this? Has through her long-suffering nature and excessive public self-flagellation earned it—the right to be seen, held precisely and accurately in someone’s regard, and loved anyway?

The problem with Ash is he always sees the best in her.

The problem with Ash is she’s making him unhappy. Or if she is not the cause of _un_ happiness she is certainly withholding things which could cause him to _be_ happy. Or the problem is with Pete and it’s that she’s a terrible partner and she feels guilty, guilty, gallows-guilty one hundred percent of the time, except she doesn’t, she only feels guilty when she thinks of it, and she doesn’t think of it, and so she is ridiculously. Stupidly. Storybook happy.

There is something different about the love of someone who can see the worst in you. Someone who doesn’t insist you’re good or pure or that very worst word, _perfect_. Someone who thinks you’re beautiful _because_ they know what’s ugly in you, not in spite of it, not because they keep insisting you’re better than you are. Someone who lets you exist flawed, awful sometimes, scaly and rotten and real. Someone whose heart you’ve broken a hundred times, who you’ve let down so often they’re below sea level, who doesn’t need illusions to love you. Someone who had you memorized before you ever met, ‘cuz you’re in the blueprint of their heart, the subway map of their tangling veins, the branches of the dendrites that arc electric forests when they think of you. 

The problem with Ash is that Pete will always love him, of course she will. But she doesn’t love him the way she promised to anymore.

She doesn’t love him like she loves Pat.

Listen: she’s trying not to think about it. She’s trying not to think about it as if not looking out the plane window will protect you from the crash. As if the ground 35,000 feet below is any softer if you have your eyes closed. As if the secret to staying aloft is to never question the miracle of flight. As if there’s nothing profane at all about causing your beloved pain while allowing yourself to be this. unbelievably. happy.

Or perhaps she isn’t happy at all. It’s boring, isn’t it, parenthood? It’s smothering, isn’t it, being the token invisible bisexual of a happy, heteronormative home. It is so fucking tedious to perform domestic and household labor for even the sweetest, most well-intentioned man. How do you add up the weight of a lifetime of subtle oppressions anyway? What unit is that measured in?

Honestly, Pete would love to have something to blame. She’s jealous of his other partners. He’s changed, or she has. He cheats. She lies. He’s not a good parent. He’s too good a parent, and it makes her feel like shit. She’s got postpartum. She doesn’t know how to write when she’s not lonely, and having a kid under 5 means never being alone again.

None of that’s true. All of that’s true. It doesn’t matter what Pete wants. This isn’t anybody’s fault.

There’s a reason all the stories are about good versus evil. Some things are easier to make sense of when there’s a bad guy. Pete would do anything for there to be a villain in this one—maybe even become one.

LA, that smoggy patchwork mountain-ribbed Eden, where bird-of-paradise grows on the roadside and the traffic moves slow enough to admire each bloom—that city where the food is all-natural non-GMO organic but the women’s bodies are fake, where everything looks better mirrored off sunglasses or the surface of someone’s pool and that’s what matters anyway, your reflection. LA, Never-neverland. That flinty, mercurial winding road to nowhere, that seabreeze roadside fruit stand where too much is the only amount that’s interesting and everyone is trying _so very fucking hard_ that artifice is, in fact, the same thing as sincerity. LA, or: the place Pete has been pretending is home.

The number one thing Pete does in Los Angeles is sit in traffic, and today is no exception. She fiddles with the radio, picks at her acne in the rearview mirror, shifts in her seat and sighs, each fold of flesh around her middle reminding her the shape of motherhood. She should call her trainer. She should call her psychiatrist. She should stop and pick up something to make for dinner. Would be nice if Ash did it for once.

She picks, she shifts, she blows her bangs off her sweaty forehead with the force of her exhalation. No breeze today. It’s like the ocean forgot they existed. Days like this, you remember California’s half a desert. Traffic inches her towards the little house that isn’t hers, exactly, but also isn’t exactly anyone else’s. Banal and forgettable, like so much seems lately, like her life is a string of waiting rooms connecting the few real moments one to the next. She knows she’s lucky to live so well, to hold so much happiness in her one small heart. But it’s hot today. Things she doesn’t think about gnaw at the edges of her attention, clouds casting shadows that fall across her mind.

The pick-up in the next lane is edging, edging, so she flaps her hand, honeys her brake, waves him in. Not going to make a difference, really, when she gets anywhere. Bronx is sleeping, finally, in the back seat. She finds traffic as meditative as Pete does. The sleepy nowhere motion puts her in a trance. Pete still catches herself thinking of her daughter as _the baby_ , but Bronx is two years old. She’s so much more than she started as. Not for everyone is that true.

Pete’s eyes drift to the bumper of the truck in front of her and the words enter her awareness like a cut deeper than nerves. She feels it before she feels it, if that makes sense: blunt force first, and then creeping with the return of feeling comes the sting.

DRUNK SLUTS LOVE ME

The words, and a shape that she feels more than sees is meant to be a body, head-tits-ass-orifices indiscriminate, and Pete can’t tell which way she’s facing or which organ is what, but Pete can tell she’s a _she_. All you can discern with certainty, really, is that it is a woman and she is degraded.

Do you have any idea how it feels to be a girl in a world like this? To try to be a woman? To have your two-year-old daughter in the back seat?

31 years old and she wants to cry, or puke, or pull him out the window of his pick-up by his hair and smash his face into her knee til her skin is as ruined as his teeth, til the blood and shredded flesh is so tangled up together even he can’t tell which chunks are SLUT and which chunks are human.

31 years old and her skin surges hot and helpless with hate, and what can she do? She slams her palm against the hardest part of her steering wheel, once twice three times, but she isn’t what she’s angry at for once. 31 years old and she drives her baby home, as safe as any woman can make her, and doesn’t have words to tell her husband what she’s upset about. He’s tired of asking, anyway. She’s tired of saying.

She’s never said it but: Pete hates living in this house. No matter how many of her things or years of her life she crams into this space, the feeling of belonging never follows. _I need an equal & opposite reaction to the gutwrench i catch off leaving you_, she writes in her journal. _you give me stars & planets spinning, take me cosmic places. but look down after you go: there’s no earth below._

Actually, awkwardly, there’s no place anymore that feels like Pete’s home. She’s not sure when it slipped away, when she last had it. Was it in between a trip to the store and back that she misplaced the feeling, so that when she returned to Ash’s house it felt empty of her? Was it during Fall Out Boy’s farewell tour, those close months on the road that no four walls could compete with? Or is it worse than that. Did she never have it at all?

Things that give Pete Wentz the feeling of home, an abridged list:

  * The smell of Pat’s hair product, breathed in during an embrace or lingering on a pillowcase in the long dull hours after she’s gone
  * The diamond bright rise-and-fall of the Chicago skyline, two thousand miles away
  * Bronx snuggling up against her like contentment and security are as plentiful as oxygen
  * The saltwater breeze that comes in off the Pacific
  * Sticky-floored punk venues with low ceilings and bad acoustics with $2 you-call-its and the smell of stale smoke, years of strangers’ sweat, and half-dead cans of beer sunk into everything
  * The spices of her mom’s cooking wafting up through the floorboards in Pete’s too-small childhood bedroom, where all the stuff once belonged to her but now the feeling of restless suburban boredom is the only thing that’s still hers



So she holds Bronx tight. She wishes she was better at loving Ash. She sniffs Pat’s pillow after she’s gone. See, all of this? It’s a Pete problem. No need to rope anybody else into it. It’s just too many years spent on the road. It’s not that this isn’t her home: it is. She doesn’t know how to feel it.

Family dinner night, or: the four hours a week when Pete’s heart is meant to be a perfect, glowing circle instead of a fractious Venn diagram. No pressure. She just needs to feel complete, on-command, Ash and Bronx and Pat all around her, and tonight she does not.

Bronx is having a difficult evening. She’s howling, just as inconsolable when she gets what she wants as when she doesn’t. Ash is being well-meaning useless in a way that feels specifically gendered. Pat—Pat was supposed to be here 45 minutes ago. Not that Pete’s counting or anything. Not that Pete feels every minute that passes like penance, a jagged-toothed bite out of the apple of her heart til all that’s left is the stinking rotten core. 

When Pat finally arrives, it’s with a hopeful smile and a Reduced Guilt cheesecake. Pete knows the way to salvage the evening is to drop her resentment at the door and fall into Pat’s arms, but today Pete is lukewarm on salvation. Today she wants to gather her hurt around her like a suffocating turtleneck, itchy and hot and impossible not to pull at. 

She goes to meet Pat in the foyer, stops just short of Pat’s reach. “Traffic?” she says, and even to Pete her tone sounds tight.

“Inspiration!” Pat gushes, oblivious. Her excitement is palpable. She has a _glow_. She closes the distance between them and pulls Pete against her with her non-cheesecake-occupied arm. “I finished a rough demo of my first song! I think I’m ready for the studio!” she bubbles. Pete nearly allows herself to thaw.

Then Pat says, “I didn’t really believe I could do it on my own before today—I thought I, like, _needed_ Fall Out Boy to exist. But I don’t! I’ve got the music in me!” She half-laughs, half-sings it. Pete’s heart is slamming against her ribcage, making it hard to take full breaths. Pat lifts her stupid cheesecake like a holy grail and says, “Thus: celebratory cheesecake! I stopped on the way. I’m so happy, babe.”

So happy. Pat is so happy. Pete is—Pete has a wailing, inconsolable two-year-old and a meal on the stove that’s both dry and cold, but might have been pretty delicious 45 minutes ago. Pete has a husband who’s been pointlessly calling _let’s just start eating without her_ from the living room, where he’s watching fucking _sports_ in a fucking _recliner_ like this is a _sitcom_. Pat is happy, and Pete is realizing that she _doesn’t_ actually exist without Fall Out Boy. She’s waning like the moon. She’s the shape of a mother, the shadow of a wife. She’s numbly running through a script the goddamn patriarchy wrote a thousand years ago, using Xanax like it’s paste for an obliging smile. She is fucking tired of being happy for everybody else. She wants to be happy for her _self_. She wants to be something to celebrate again. She wants to be _herself_.

“Does low-fat cheesecake count as celebration? Or is it just body shame in shrink wrap? I liked you better when you didn’t count calories.” It’s out of Pete’s mouth before she can stop it. She knows how hard Pat’s been working at diet and nutrition since her doctor told her she was pre-diabetic. She knows it’s not about entertainment industry standards for women’s looks—or at least, as not not about that as anything can be. She’s proud of Pat, honestly. But she’s feeling poisonous, and poison comes out.

Even as Pat’s face falls, Ash comes gallivanting in like Prince Fucking Charming, suddenly useful. Bronx is screaming in his arms, the first indication he’s shown of knowing how to hold his daughter in hours. “Oh, give her a break, Petey,” he says. “Cheesecake sounds delicious. Here, trade ya,” he says to Pat, moving to swap Bronx for the much more cooperative cake. 

Pete intercepts, snatching up her squalling daughter and snapping, “You can’t just pass her off on the nearest person with a vulva.”

Ash rolls his eyes at Pat, ignoring Pete entirely. “Want a beer? I’ll grab you one.”

Pat hesitates, looking at Pete almost pleadingly, like she’s saying with her eyes _please don’t_. Don’t make me side with him. Don’t be a bitch. Be a good woman and do your job with a smile. Pete fills in every blank with her hurt feelings, her mounting rage. They live in the same city and this is the first time she’s seen Pat all week. 

Pat opens her mouth and Pete glares harder. There’s no right thing to say: she’d rather Pat didn’t try. Pat closes her mouth and rubs Bronx’s back instead. Bronx’s tiny fists pound against Pete’s shoulder and breastbone, and Pete wishes it hurt. 

“Well go on,” Pete snaps, because she can’t stand the silence. Can’t stand Pat’s kindness.

And she gets exactly what she asked for, the exact opposite of what she wanted. Exasperated, Pat says “Fine” and walks after Ash. Pete ends up with one child, two partners, and all alone.

That night, Ash and Pat sound asleep on either edge of Pete’s California King bed, Pete sits downstairs alone, crying as quietly as possible and whispering into the phone. “I just can’t figure out how to feel happy like this,” she’s saying. Storybook forgotten. Storybook only accessible when it’s her-and-Pat and she can forget the rest, and what kind of mother does that make her? Storybook _broken_. Happy in the wrong ways, and never enough. “I am trying so fucking hard but I just don’t know _how_.”

“Happiness isn’t a skill or an ability, babe,” Andy’s voice comes back, distorted by distance and lower than it was before they started taking T. “Maybe you aren’t feeling happy because you’re not.”

“I am, though,” Pete insists. “Look at my life. I’ve got everything I said I wanted.”

“Doesn’t mean you actually want it.”

That’s too close. Pete can’t speak, on account of how there’s no oxygen left in the universe. But anoxia doesn’t stop the words, billboard-big, from flashing through her head. There are some things she can’t bring herself to say out loud, not even to Andy. Things she can’t even let herself think.

In the silence, all Pete can hear is her own treacherous heart.

“Come home,” Andy says at last. They rescue each other, Pete and Andy. Andy and Pete. This is no exception. Still: home? Pete would laugh if her tongue was any less heavy with dread. If she knew where _that_ was, she’d have no fucking problems.

But Andy rescues her from that too. “Come stay with me, I mean. You need a vacation. Some breathing room. The comforting mundanity of Flatlandia USA. It’s hard to be a mom, right? Let alone a good partner to two entire adults? And we both know how Pat gets when she’s recording—she won’t even notice you’re gone. So run away with me, Wentz. Come see the fall color of the Midwest. Your palm trees will be exactly the fucking same whenever you come back.” 

Their voice is so warm, so constant through Pete’s life it is an anchor. Or the wavering beam of a lighthouse in a storm. Or the shores Pete washes up on. Andy’s voice is a nautical metaphor. Andy’s voice is home, or a glimmer of it. 

“Can we sleep in a van?” Pete asks, and she is surprised as anyone to hear that she’s laughing. 

“Didn’t I tell you I sold the house? A van is actually the only option,” Andy cracks.

“I’m on the next plane there,” Pete says. And she means it. She books her ticket on her phone while Andy’s still chatting. She doesn’t even think til after it’s done that she probably, possibly, maybe, should have checked with her husband first.

Pete and Andy walk from Reckless Records, where Pat used to work, down the street to Kitchen 17 for vegan burgers. Pete’s carrying a bottle of cheap wine, missing her daughter, and grilling Andy about the status of her relationship with Jo.

“I’m just saying, I fly in to visit you in Milwaukee, yet here we are sleeping out of Josephine’s guest rooms in Chitown three days later,” she needles, bumping her hip against Andy’s suggestively. “If the other guest room is really where you’re sleeping.”

This goofy grin melts over Andy’s face before they can hide it. They try to cover it with a scowl, but it is extremely unconvincing. “Well, we have to make our own opportunities to hang out since you dissolved our band,” they say. “Speaking of which. She asked if she can join us for lunch?”

“Can’t bear to be parted, huh? Not even for a few hours?”

Andy rolls their eyes hugely but has no leg to stand on, here, really. “You’re one to talk,” they say, shifting the attention unfavorably to Pete and Pete’s behavior. “This is the first time you’ve been anywhere without Pat glued to your side in, like, two years.”

“Wish that were true,” Pete grumbles, then regrets her honesty immediately. Regretting her own honesty is a very 2008 way of life, though, and she’s living in the ass end of 2010. Which means: Pete deserves better from herself. “I mean. You know. That’s why you invited me here. Because Pat doesn’t have time for me.”

Andy just gives Pete an eyebrow lift. Pete draws her arms around herself, shivers in the sharp autumn air. She looks at her feet on the sidewalk and keeps talking.

“She’s excited. And exciting. Like, relevant—an artist in her own right. I mean, we always knew she was a genius. I should be grateful she kept me around as long as she did. As a bassist, I mean,” she says fast, to her feet, because Andy makes a noise of disgruntlement. “Like. We all knew she was talented enough to make it on her own, play our instruments better than we ever did, and now she is, and I’m—of course I’m happy for her, but it makes me feel like… well, I’m nobody now. Like an Emily Dickinson poem. Just this soft-around-the-middle mom who only wants to talk about what her baby did today and what her husband didn’t. Rock stars should never retire, Andy, they should die while they’re still famous.”

Pete stops suddenly on the sidewalk and looks up at Andy, her eyes blurred and burnt with tears, her jaw set like she’s walking into a fight. They’ve walked past the restaurant now by half a block. “Oh, babe,” Andy says, and their voice is soft with something terrible. “Pat can’t drum better than me. I don’t want you to think that.” 

The gentle humor is love incarnate: Pete gives like a structure of wet sand hit by a wave, crumples onto Andy’s warm, solid chest, and permits herself to weep.

“I don’t want to be married to Ash anymore,” she confesses into Andy’s chest. Her voice is warped and garbled. The shape and sound of her words go unheard: entirely eroded, obscured by her sobs. 

From her childhood bedroom in Chicago, Pete can reach into her own timeline and become any version of herself. She chooses herself when she and Pat started dating the first time: sexy, self-assured, every part of her body tight and lithe. The self-loathing is just part of her easy charm. No daughter she misses like a stinging-hot rash, no husband who makes her feel sticky and dread-sick and wrong. No stretch marks. No weird-shaped tits that do not, and will not ever again, look like things that haven’t been used to nurse an infant. That will not ever appear in a magazine or a photo leak, nonetheless a scuzzy stranger’s dirty daydream, again.

She reaches back and back and back for an unblemished version of herself. For a happy one. For one as vital and successful as Pat is now, without her. But this bittersweet unmanageable creature, half-suicidal and champagne drunk and beautiful and scared on the roof of a hotel, is as close as she comes. The only thing she has in common with her younger self anymore, feels like, is that neither of them are taking their meds as prescribed.

From her childhood bedroom in Chicago, Pete sends Pat smutty pictures she knows better than to take, soaks her undies reading the filthy-poetic emails Pat sends back. They whisper on the phone at night, Pete’s hand between her thighs, Pat’s velvety murmur in her ear. Pete feels closer to Pat from across the continent than she felt in the same city, than she felt in the same bed. She doesn’t say this out loud. She can’t say any of this out loud. If anyone learns your wish, the magic breaks and it won’t come true. She does not think about how dangerous it is, teaching girls that the fact of their desire itself is an unbreakable taboo. Even when she time-travels back to different versions of herself, her mind is a hedge maze of things she cannot think about. She can see through the branches, almost. Can see over the top, maybe, if she stands on her toes. So she hunches, keeps her eyes fixed on her feet. There’s a certain thrill in being lost, a mystery in pretending you don’t know the way out. Because of course there is only one possible path that leads away from the heart of this tangled labyrinth. And Pete can’t say out loud she’s walking it, ‘cause then she’ll never get free.


	2. boxed blondes have less fun

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We all disappoint each other, don't we?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [sad, thematic songs are here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3skAi5pmAKQv4zylQJRnJj)

For the first time ever, Pat is in the studio alone.

She feels strange to herself. She mutters out loud about her process and no one rolls their eyes at her. She pushes the same puff of hair out of her eyes over and over, wishing she had a hat (or a less stupid haircut). She’s never recorded by herself before. Not unless you count balancing a guitar on her knees in front of her mom’s computer desk, belting covers into a shitty desktop microphone and throwing low-quality MP3s up on fileshare sites at age 16. It’s… not really comparable.

The thing is, she told everyone this was gonna be some kind of big _reinvention_. She’s partway through establishing a new look: soon-to-be-platinum hair in a complicated lesbian pouf, tailored suits and leather motorcycle gloves she doesn’t know how she’ll ever be brave enough to wear, and she’s most of the way to dropping 50 pounds, much to Pete’s dismay. She wrote all this weird experimental shit, decided she’d record and mix and produce and finance everything all by herself, and went and Announced To The World she was going to do something completely, entirely, totally unlike whatever they expected from the lead singer of Fall Out Boy.

Now she’s got to actually _do it_.

Her first eight hours of solo studio time, she ends up basically just wasting. Songs she plays with gusto at home, she suddenly can’t get through. Every other note is the wrong one. She cycles through instruments and tracks and fucks up every possible permutation of the two. Eventually she’s so embarrassed she just lies down on the floor and stares at the ceiling til the hours run out. It’s movie theater carpet, kids’ birthday carpet, bar mitzvah carpet: dark and speckled with primary color designs. It is the perfect complement to shame.

On her way out, she passes another musician. She pulls her bangs over her eyes so she doesn’t have to look at him. Today is bullshit.

In the car, Pat calls the only person she’s ever met who always knows what to do.

“Good afternoon, Patricia,” says Jo, because she is incapable of answering the phone like a normal person. “Finished your first solo platinum album yet?”

Pat groans. “Literally the opposite. You’re being upsetting on purpose.”

“No hello? Straight to accusations? I’m hurt!”

“Hello, you are terrible, I need your help.”

Jo laughs, a sound like getting blasted by a sudden sunbeam, and the thrummy _ick_ in Pat’s chest starts to release a little bit. “My calendar says today’s your first day in the studio. Sounds _no bueno_?”

“Sounds like _nada de nada_ ,” Pat says glumly. “I couldn’t play anything! I just kept fucking up. By the time I quit, I couldn’t play two consecutive measures without blowing it.”

“Don’t exaggerate,” Jo says. “You know you get extreme when you’re upset.”

“Not this time. I really sucked that profoundly today. I’d send you the raw audio but I wiped the files before I left.”

“And you’re usually a total file hoarder.” Jo’s voice goes soft with baby-animal compassion. “My poor Pattycake! You gave yourself the yips.”

“The excuse me?” As Pat puts blocks between herself at the studio, and Jo fills her ear with friendship and distraction, the snarl in her chest gets smoother and smoother. “For the last time, I do _not_ have an STD.”

“The yips like in baseball. It’s true you _are_ a hussy, but the yips are when you psych yourself out so bad with terror about your own failure, your body starts backing you up. Pat-astrophe Stump tells herself _oh shit, that one trumpet error means I’ll fail at everything forever_ , and suddenly your fingers are falling off the keys and your wrist is spasming every time you try to play.”

“Okay, I entirely object to your premise,” Pat says, shifting her phone from one ear to the other so she can wrench her steering wheel, illegally using a bike lane to get around an especially preposterous example of unnecessary LA congestion, “but first please tell me since when you watch baseball?”

“Well, it’s more Andy—”

“I KNEW IT! Yes. I just wanted to hear you say it,” Pat cheers. “You two are still doing _everything_ together, aren’t you? Yessss.”

“If I have to hear one more time about your and Pete’s bet on whether we start dating—”

“Shhh, don’t ruin this for me. I’m a washed-up failure as a musician. Let me savor my one success at matchmaking.”

“So speaking of your failures. Did you want to actually talk about it, or did you call just to make me listen to your relationship conspiracy theories?”

As soon as she thinks about what happened today, Pat starts feeling bad again. This is why she started teasing Jo in the first place. The words burst out nauseous and needy: “Tell me how to cure the yips before everyone finds out I’m a fraud and I lose music forever?”

By the time she gets home, she’s feeling a little better. Jo has given her the exact perfect blend of cajoling, cheerleading, and addressing her actual problems. (Up to and including a four-and-a-half point plan to return to the studio strong and emerge victorious. One point of which is watching a scene from _The Empire Strikes Back_. Jo is mysterious.)

Maybe she can actually salvage this night, she thinks when she finds a parking space directly across from her front door, which on the LA scale of miracles is equivalent to having the Virgin Mary appear in your gluten-free bagel. Then, mid-parallel-park, her ass sticking 70 degrees out into the street, it all comes crashing down:

She drove to her apartment again, the little pink one on the wrong side of Echo Park. The one that’s one, two _hours_ of traffic at this time of day in the opposite direction of Pete’s.

Tonight she was supposed to be at Pete’s.

“Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Pete and Ash and Bronx live in this sweet little bungalow up in Beverly Hills, decorated by someone Ash _paid_ to figure out how a home should feel. Pat didn’t come from money, only has a little bit now, didn’t know services like that even existed—why would you need a stranger to tell you what kind of furniture you liked and what kind of space you wanted to live in? Maybe the bungalow was cozy when just Ash lived in it, but Ash plus Pete plus the frenetic sprawl of a two-year-old makes it chaotic. Adding Pat into the mix…

Well, she likes it better when Pete stays at her place. Likes it so much better it hurts Pete’s feelings. (Especially when she autopilots out to _the wrong fucking apartment_.) But it’s not like Pat’s doing it on purpose! She likes the lived-in comfort of her own space, her homey clutter, her crowds of instruments and her shelves thick with books she’s had since she was a kid, the no-particular-aesthetic of a Midwest girl’s sanctum sanctorum. She likes when it’s just her and Pete, when she can squint and pretend no one’s wearing a wedding band, that it’s always been just they two, no breakups no marriages no interruptions. She likes when Pete is no one’s wife, when no one else kisses or holds her, when she doesn’t shout down the stairs about grocery lists and what’s in the pantry like she has a whole entire _life_ with someone who isn’t Pat. She likes when it’s just the two of them in her bedroom, in her bed.

(She likes it when it’s the three of them, but it feels dangerous to say. Pete-Pat-Bronx, three girls who love each other, who are making it up as they go along—the three of them a family. She likes it too much. She worries about what it means when _that_ shows up in your tea leaves. She worries Pete will find out, that it will show in the softness of her gaze when she looks at Bronx and pretends, for one secret second in her heart, that she’s Pat’s little girl. Pat has always wanted a family, which she has the sense is controversial for a lesbian rock star of the minor canon. Which she _knows_ is controversial for the girlfriend of a woman who’s already married, already mothered. Sometimes she feels like she’s watching Pete live out the life Pat always wanted, and Pat is on the fringes of it, a detachable prosthetic limb. No matter how good she is, even if she’s better, no one’s mistaking her for the real thing.)

Anyway, it’s not that the way things are is _bad_ , exactly. It’s just—not what Pat would choose, now, today, if she was given a choice. And she feels the truth of that daily.

Not that Pete wants to hear any of that. Pete is happy like a kid at Christmas that this is all _working_ , that motherhood is not the ill-fitting casket she had once imagined it to be, that love is real and grows in any number of forms. Pete is surrounded by everyone she loves and has no problems. Pete just wants Pat to remember to drive to the right fucking house on family night.

“Fuck,” Pat says again. Someone behind her honks, wanting to use the street. She picks her head up off the steering wheel, finishes parking, goes inside. She’s not making it to Pete’s tonight. There’s no way. She’s just so _tired_. She just wants to be _home_.

She doesn’t want to explain to Pete why where Pete is doesn’t feel like home.

_u almost here? want to hear all about yr 1st day <3 <3 <3_

Pat’s phone buzzes like the feeling of letting down someone you love. She thumbs the screen guiltily and the iMessage twitches, refusing to wipe away.

 _I’m so sorry babe, I’m not gonna make it_

Pat types the message in, stares at it, then erases it letter by letter. Take two:

_you know how firsts are: never live up to the hype. You’re gonna hate me, I drove to my place again. Highway hypnosis!!_

Then she grimaces, taps back to the beginning of the message to add an apology, then highlights the whole message and deletes it into oblivion. Fuck. How many people in the world are hunched over phones right now, tortured character by character just trying to connect?

Pat looks around her empty apartment, the close dark comfort and how glad she is she’s here. Guilt stabs at her. You treacherous bitch, she tells herself. Not that she uses that word. She types fast, hits Send on a blast of false cheer before her indecision catches up to her thumbs.

_It was a good day but I’m beat. gotta miss family night. But i can’t wait to see you tomorrow!_

The message whooshes away to Pete, and she feels no relief at all. These days, there’s a lot she’s backspacing instead of sending. These days there’s a lot of connections she can’t figure out how to make.

The response is almost instant. Means Pete’s been waiting by the phone. It’s a line of crying emojis followed by the text _I understand, sf. get some rest. see u so soon_

SF, if you were wondering, is short for Spitfire. The sweet and silly nickname Pete, and only Pete, has been calling her for—fuck. Years. A fresh, nauseating wave of guilt sweeps through Pat’s belly. But it’s not like she drove here on purpose, right?

She flips her phone face down and heads for her laptop. She’s got a lot of work to do before tomorrow.

Pete leaves suddenly for Chicago, and Pat composes emails while she’s gone. She writes from the studio, which now that Pete is out of town, she rarely has to leave. Truthfully this makes her grateful, and gratitude where there used to be guilt frees up a lot of energy. Her music does not quite flow, not yet; but fragment by fragment, she unearths it. The work is happening. In the absence of all her cramped inner conflicts about Pete, her record unfolds.

Her bones buzz with expansion, her pelvis aches. Her body misses Pete like it’s making ransom demands, and she’s got so much hope about the songs she’s been recording that she feels it shining out of her, her skin overfull. She curls up in a chair over the mixing board, feeling the seam of her jeans rub against the exact spot where she most misses Pete, and pulls out her phone. Her fingers outpace her sore, soaring heart.

_i’m daydreaming about having you slow, hands and mouths playful and searching. The way your hipbones feel on top of mine. The way you pin my hands, grin wicked down at me, hovering just out of reach of my kiss, til I’m straining against your hold and my breath catches desperate, and you bear down on me, kissing me with so much force it drives me back into the mattress, i’m buried and drowning in you, and when you break off it’s so abrupt i’m caught somewhere between gasping for breath and begging for more. My lips swell, the inside of my mouth tastes red. My body pulses like all of me is ripe, stone fruit with a clenched core, ready for you… You lick your fingers before you put them inside me. Warm and wet, they stroke velvet, and I open for you. You rub curious, petting the tiny pearl at the opening of me, til I’m too tight to bear it. My hips arch of their own accord, a bone-lined bridge leading to you, and you finally reach for the depths of me. It is like being pierced by beauty or truth, like some pretty metaphor pushing inside me. this feeling cuts through everything else. You fuck into me with your fingers, sending my body shuddering with conflicting pleasures, the over-intensity of my clit and the hungry heat at the core of me, and I am ruined for you, fucked open and stupid for it, my whole body splayed-out nerves so i near forget i exist, and your mouth is just a point of heat fixed to my breast, the scrape of teeth and the throb of nerve-thrill pleasure. When you kiss lower down my body, when you trail white teeth and bruises down my ribs, biting at my belly, gnawing at my hip, til your teeth find the sweet softness of my inner thigh… i lose my mind. I black out, i go to heaven, i live or i die. It doesn’t matter as long as it feels like this. Your teeth sear and your tongue soothes and i can’t take it anymore, I’m crying out, and you take my hips in your hands and bury your face in me. Your tongue finds my clit shiny and hard, and your fingers work deeper. Your chin grinds against bundles of nerves and i stutter open and closed, the whole of my consciousness reduced to the heat of one spasming membrane. You suck on me, your tongue flicks casual ruination, and i don’t know what kind of sound I make when i come, because i’m not there anymore. Release rips through me so deep it feels like violence. It’s years before i can open my eyes and see anything more than my own heartbeat. but there you are: your chin slick and your lips parted and both of us breathing hard. your eyes are dark, serious and slow in their contemplation of me. You’ll wait for me to catch my breath, for the world to stop spinning, but we both know the night is just beginning. who but me has ever seen something as beautiful?_

_p.s. come for me—come home for me. Come home._

By the time Pete lands back at LAX, Pat has a bad case of sex madness. Mutual horniness has erased whatever they were both misfiring at each other about before Pete left. All Pat wants is to get her hands (and mouth) on her girlfriend again, and she doesn’t care who she has to share with, doesn’t care about feeling like an outsider, doesn’t care how jealous Pete’s been acting of Pat’s career when Pete’s the one who wanted to retire. She doesn’t even care about her nerves over the rapidly imminent release of her EP or how much money will be left in her account after she pays for its first printing. All she cares about is that woman on that plane in that _body_.

An hour before she’s planning to leave so she can surprise Pete with a ride home from the airport, she gets a text. It’s a picture message of red, teary-eyed Pete holding Bronx in her arms. They’re grinning at each other, woman and her likeness, Bronx’s chubby baby hands starfishing on either side of Pete’s face. Pat took Bronx to the park and out for ice cream five days ago, and she recognizes from Bronx’s skinned elbow and the length of Pete’s hair that this is a recent picture, not one from before Pete left. 

_home sweet home_ , her phone buzzes a moment later. _got on an earlier flight so i could be reunited with MY GIRL!!!! God i missed LA_

Pat honestly has no idea what to say. She’s hurt, wildly, that Pete has ruined a surprise she didn’t know about. She feels disappointment in a violent crash, the same way a fist feels a pane of glass. She used to be Pete’s girl. She used to be Pete’s everything.

The hurt, the rotten wormy cavity of it: Pat bears down, wanting to feel every possible crevice of this pain. To consume it entire and either understand it, or be transformed by it. It’s not even about the sex, though five minutes ago sex was all she cared about. It’s about who you tell in advance, before you get on a different plane. It’s about who’s holding the camera (hint: it’s not Pat), about who gets invited to tearful reunions with tiny daughters. It’s about essential personnel. It’s about _belonging_.

Her heart’s all twisted up around how they’re supposed to be family but they’re not, not really. Ash-and-Bronx-and-Pete are a biological reality, a genetic inevitability. They belong together one-and-one-and-one forever, in a way Pat does not have the anatomy to ever compete with. Like a snubbed fairy crashing a christening, it thickens bitter inside her that she’s always wanted to have kids. That she’s always wanted to have kids _with Pete._ That she wishes in secret Bronx could be hers, for real and for ever. Maybe she wishes there was some ceremony from Germanic folklore, involving iron shoes and leaping over fires and chewing glass without breaking it and walking three times through a bramble thicket, and at the end of it Bronx would flush with Pat’s blood. Maybe she wishes that she could swallow a freshwater pearl and a baby would grow inside of her, by magic mingling her and Pete, so that at the end of nine months there would be a child with Pat’s nose and Pete’s laugh, Pat’s golden hair and Pete’s quick tongue, Pat’s blush and Pete’s brow. Maybe she wishes a warty old witch would turn Ash into a frog and it could be just Pete and Pat again, just the two-plus-Bronx of them, a family.

But of the two of them, only Pete believes in fairy tales. Pat would raise her daughters without them, teach them only the word _king_ and live in ignorance of princesses. Pat Stump does not believe in wishes. She only believes in putting herself on the line, working hard, and making her own damn dreams come true.

So she clarifies what she’s mad about down into a hot, hard pebble, red as iron, salt as blood. And she swallows it. Nothing will grow in her from that. But she won’t break anything with it either.

She texts back, _aww, my girls. Hope i get to see you soon._ And she turns off her phone before Pete can ask her to join them for welcome home dinner, or send any more family pictures that Pat’s not in. Equal parts heartbroken and horny, she stays home alone. She makes a feast of her own jealous heart.

*

At the end of 2004, it’s the fourth or fifth time Pat’s playing cosmetologist with Pete’s head, and she’s getting cocky. It’s in the way she snaps the rubber gloves on. How she mixes in developer powder without flinching like she’s never gotten in her eyes, like she was never a huge baby about it, like she never made Pete call poison control and say _uhhh what happens if my girlfriend got some hair dye in her eyeball._ Like she never left Pete looking like a spotted fucking leopard instead of sporting the stylish, bleach-blond chunks she asked for. 

It’s cute is what it is. Pat’s even humming while she works.

Pete relaxes into her touch, the fingertips of the girl she loves massaging bleach into her hair. Pete’s hair is long-ish, for her, the sharply angled tips brushing her collarbones. Pat’s assignment today: neon purple ends. Pete wants it to ooze out of her dense natural black like ultraviolet.

“Remember not to fuck up,” Pete says, just to be annoying. Pat sticks her tongue out at Pete in the mirror, impervious to assholery at this point. They’ve been dating for over a year now. Pete keeps biting her lips so she won’t say out loud _too good to be true._

“I’m giving you zebra stripes, just for that,” Pat warns her.

“Ooh, can you? That actually sounds better than what we have planned.”

Pat leans over Pete’s shoulder and kisses—bites, really—the side of Pete’s neck. Then, while Pete’s distracted, she tugs her hair. “Ow!” Pete protests. “Watch it, gloves!”

She twists in her chair, catches Pat’s wrists up in her hands, kisses her laughing girlfriend hard on the mouth. Pat sways back with the force of the kiss and Pete presses her advantage, rising to pin Pat against the bathroom vanity. Pat’s head bumps the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet as their tongues join, dark-sweet-wet in the shared space of their mouths. Pete transfers Pat’s wrists to one hand, pushes those gloved hands against the wall above Pat’s head, uses her free hand to grip Pat’s waist, to work up under the edge of Pat’s sweater and feel the soft goodness of her skin. Pat moans a little, a small sound in her throat that makes Pete’s heart swoop low, a feeling like falling dipping between her hipbones. Pete fumbles one-handed with Pat’s jeans, pops the button and pulls wide the zipper. Pat grinds up against her touch and something on the bathroom counter falls loudly into the sink.

Pete needs another hand to properly address the problem posed by Pat’s pants, so she drops her wrists and works Pat’s jeans down over her hips, tugging the underwear with them. She strokes between Pat’s legs with one hand, coarse hair and velvet skin and a warm, inviting damp that guides Pete’s touch deeper. Pat squirms and shudders, making little fists of Pete’s sleeves and skin, and when Pete breaks their kiss to kneel, Pat’s hands press her shoulders down. Pat’s fingers twine in her hair while Pete uses her jaw to angle Pat’s thighs apart, while Pete’s tongue traces a map to Pat’s buried sweetness.

Her jaw is aching, her chin is slick, and Pat’s making enough noise that the neighbors are definitely disturbed, when Pete becomes distantly aware that her scalp is burning. Pat’s gloves, she realizes. They’ve touched all over her body, clothes, and hair. And how long has the bleach been on her ends anyway?

Pat’s got a tight handful of Pete’s hair and she shudders, her knees trying to give, and Pete digs her chin in, licking deep. She’s had stupid hair before, hasn’t she? Finishing this is more important. A smile twitches the corner of her lips, the taste of Pat all around her, and she sucks at the clit of the woman she loves. She holds Pat’s hips, equal parts supporting her and holding her in place. “Fuck, Pete, _fuck me_ ,” Pat cries. Pete decides to forget about the burning. She’s got a job to do.

*

“Remember that time we broke half my hair off with bleach?” Pete asks in the first days of 2011, standing over Pat and crooking her black-gloved fingers ominously.

Pat meets her own eyes in the mirror and widens them. She barely recognizes herself under all the eyeliner, black little fishhook wings that accentuate the porcelain-sheen of pale powder, highlighted cheekbones, red lips. Petra-the-Menace up there is aiming for platinum blond, and Pat looks like a mid-90s boy bander with her hair all gooey with developer paste. She looks kind of good, Pat thinks, and she never thinks that about herself. If she doesn’t recognize herself, isn’t that the point of reinvention? _Like Debbie Harry?_ Pete asked, when Pat first presented her plans. _With Bowie’s suits_ , Pat agreed.

Now, Pat raises a sculpted eyebrow at Pete and says, “Do _not_ break my hair off.”

“I don’t remember you complaining last time,” Pete flirts, licking her lips and waggling her own overgrown eyebrows. Pat’s always counted herself lucky to call such a beautiful woman her own, but hell if it doesn’t annoy her sometimes that Pete looks so good in sweatpants and a mom-bod while she’s busting her ass at the gym twice a day and serving her food with measuring cups, just to sell records, just so she doesn’t look like a farm animal when she gets back onstage. 

“That’s because it was _your_ hair, darling,” Pat says, turning in her seat to kiss Pete, light and fleeting as she wishes she felt. “This is mine. This is _serious._ ”

Pete leans in, kisses her way down Pat’s neck, probably hoping to recreate the sexy mayhem of their youth, but Pat’s focus is not so easily swayed. She leans in close to her reflection, poking the edges of her eyebrows. “These are too skinny, aren’t they? I should tell the stylist to ease up next time.”

“I like your natural eyebrows,” Pete volunteers. “I’ve always thought they grow in perfect.”

“Yes, but you’re unreliable,” Pat smiles at her. “You think everything about me is perfect.”

“Because you—”

“I know, I know. Listen, how much longer til we rinse? I’ve got more auditions tonight for my touring band. Our first show is in, like, weeks.”

Pat’s preoccupied, careless. Her heart cramps up with her own thoughtlessness when Pete speaks like a deflated balloon. “Will you be out late? I was thinking we could order in Chinese, get into some wine, watch a terrible lesbian movie?”

Pat tries to keep the guilt off her face. She’s got so much to do, lately—so much at stake. And Pete has everything, doesn’t she? Kid, husband, happy home. The last thing she wants to be doing is waiting up for Pat all alone. Pat tries to be kind. She turns all the way around in her chair, smiles up at Pete’s worried face. “That sounds great,” she says, “but not tonight. Anyway, I’ve had you for almost 24 hours now, I know you’re dying to get back to your little girl. You should go home tonight, babe.”

“I, uh. Don’t. Have Bronx tonight,” Pete says, and Pat can’t read her tone.

“What do you mean?”

“Me and Ash are trying a kind of… joint… well, whatever. You’re barely at the house, I don’t expect you to keep up with the day-to-day. Our domestic schedule is pretty boring compared to the rock star life.”

Pat feels the sting of that like a slap across her face. Is Pete shutting her out on purpose? Or is Pete hurt too? “You know I want to be there, Pan,” she says, which is not quite a lie but not the truth either. She does not say: _You know I want to be on the list of people who get consulted about Bronx and updated about her schedule. You know I wish this played out a little less heteromonogamy, a little more touch me._

Pete affects a pout. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I hope you hate every bassist you meet. I hope they are musically talented but personally, like, repugnant.”

Pat stands, her diamond-bright hair standing straight up and sticky, and puts her hands on Pete’s waist. She leans back to regard her. “You’re jealous,” she decides.

“Well, how would you feel if I started collaborating with someone really sexy?”

“I’d be delighted for you,” Pat says, and means it. She couldn’t possibly be more jealous of anything in Pete’s professional life than she is of Pete’s family, the one she is sometimes part of. “You clearly need _some_ thing to do with your time. I don’t like being your only project—you get weird.”

“You’re not my only project,” says Pete. She doesn’t quite meet Pat’s eyes.

Pat knows what to do from here, at least. Some of the beats of their relationship have changed very little over the years. When Pete withdraws, it’s because she wants Pat to come get her. So Pat lifts her chin with a fingertip, meets her eyes for a long moment, then kisses her. It is soft but not fleeting. It is rich with tenderness, with history. Pat feels the thrill of it race up her spine. Even after all these years, Pete’s lips are a lightning bolt jolt to the core of her. One brush of a kiss fills her imagination with a hundred jumbled memories and yet-to-bes, a tangle of limbs and feelings and flavors. These two bodies, twinned and twined. A lifetime’s worth of combinations. 

“I’m only auditioning boys today,” Pat says. “So you can stop being all cute and threatened. Now let’s rinse this out while I still have hair.”

She suspects Pete enjoys it, just a little, holding the back of Pat’s neck and shoving her head in the sink, under the water. 

Her first solo show is at a bar in LA. She’s doing it all herself, no booking agent, no label, no press team. She dropped her EP without fanfare, kind of abruptly, digital plus limited release vinyl. She pressed 500 multicolored records and staggered at the price. She’s paying for the whole tour herself. After what the studio time and production cost, she needs ticket and record sales in a big way. It’s a make-or-break type of situation, the tenuous razor’s edge of music she thought she left behind years ago. Pete always told her she was the golden ticket, but Pat knew that Pete’s savvy for branding and marketing would always pave a path for her into the future. Pete made it possible for Pat to lose herself in the music, not worry about the rest.

Now, sweating backstage and hoping door tickets are selling like Air Jordans, wearing leather gloves and a bowtie and the stupidest hair, Pat crosses herself and prays to every pantheon she can think of that it wasn’t arrogance, imagining her leftover fame and musical ability would be enough to make this endeavor work.

“God, you look good,” Pete says for the nth time, running her hands over Pat’s recently slim hips, swatting her firm butt with satisfaction. Pat finds this stressful: one more thing to worry about on a night full of nervous terror. 

Pat can’t stop looking in the mirror, measuring how pink and sweaty she’s getting. “I look like a pig in a bow tie,” she moans. Her forehead is shiny with actual visible beads of sweat.

“ _Stop_ ,” says Pete with real annoyance. “I have heard you talk enough shit about your body this year to last a lifetime, okay? I know you’ve never fronted before and you’re probably nervous as hell, but don’t take it out on my girl.” 

Pete circles her arms around Pat’s waist, kisses the inner curve of her neck decisively. Pat feels anything but settled, but she lets herself fold against Pete. “Everyone’s going to be looking at me,” she whispers. “I don’t know how to do this without you.”

“You’re not doing it without me,” Pete says. Her eyes blaze and she clasps Pat close. “You’re never doing _any_ thing without me, Spitfire. I won’t allow it.”

And Pat knows she means it. Pete will be standing in the wings the whole time, like a secret only Pat can see, and if she asked Pete would be on the barrier in the front row screaming, or on stage with her playing along, or up in the rafters manually working the spotlight, probably. But she’s never had anything that wasn’t Pete’s. And Pete has so much that will never be hers.

She takes a breath. She takes Pete’s hands and holds them over her fast-rabbit heart. She says, tries, becomes something new. “It’s okay,” she says. “I want to learn how to do it alone.”


	3. we were never friends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Fear is okay because you cannot really displace it… there are, however, words sung in a certain order that can bring us to leap anyway, in spite of it. You gotta allow room to grow into your own greatness. Love is important. Let the spirit move you."  
> -Pete Wentz, 2019

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the end, for now.
> 
> [endings are happy and sad at once](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3skAi5pmAKQv4zylQJRnJj)

“Sometimes I love being a mammal,” Pete murmurs, rolling over and stretching her body awake in Pat’s bed. It’s hard to explain the deep-good _rightness_ of this, Pat’s breath on her cheek and her drool on Pat’s pillow, the burning blush of hormones that sizzle through her, that shift like the earth’s mantle as she arrives, chemically and cellularly, at a profound belonging. Oxytocin is good shit.

She doesn’t think about the contrast. About the difference between a person with one bed and two. Instead she nuzzles the cold tip of her nose into Pat’s neck. Pat swats at Pete without opening her eyes, groaning. “M’not a mammal,” she mumbles. “Reptile before 9am.” She tries to pull the sheet over her face, but Pete’s laying on it. Patricia has never relished mornings.

“Let me warm you up, coldblood,” Pete laughs, the sound snagging low in her morning throat. She rolls onto Pat, her hands darting to steal touches of silky skin, half-sensual and half-pestering. She loves to fuck when they first wake up, messy hair and morning breath, but she may love ambushing Pat in tickle fights more. On the best mornings, there’s time for both. Pat squirms beneath her, their hipbones pressed flush, and Pete sees her smile before she can hide it. 

“Filthy—primate—” Pat squawks, heaving her pillow towards Pete.

Pete dodges, laughing, “You’re slow when you’re sleepy, snakegirl!” 

Pat’s grey-blue eyes are finally open, rewarding Pete with a thin slitted glare more beautiful than sunrise. “Motherhood has ruined your Saturday morning instincts,” she pronounces. Pete lands a particularly good poke in her side and Pat squirms beneath her, a gratifying sensation Pete wouldn’t mind repeating. “Get your bony witch fingers out of my—”

Pete catches Pat’s complaint with a kiss, finds a less antagonistic way to touch her. Makes sure Pat doesn’t mind _too_ terribly waking up.

Over breakfast—grapefruit half, scrambled eggs, black coffee—Pete scrolls on her phone and Pat hunches over her laptop. Pete likes the quietness of this ritual, of mornings at Pat’s. She imagines it will be like this, when it’s just the two of them and Bronx in their own place. Her stomach twists acid under the implication of that sleepy, aimless thought: the deep knowing she’s settled into over the course of nearly a year that she and Ash aren’t ending up together after all. Since she’s twisting her stomach anyway, she goes ahead and worries whether Pat will still want her, under the circumstances of accidental unplanned monogamy, of joint custody, of a girl and her daughter crashing the independent, bachelor artist’s life Pat has been living since she moved to LA. She worries whether Pat still wants a family, like this, with her. She knows Pat has been avoiding them.

Across the table Pat’s mouth makes a moue of displeasure. “Huh,” she mutters. Pete is all too happy to leave her own thoughts behind and zoom in on Pat’s.

“What’s up, love?” she asks.

Mouth twisted, Pat spins her laptop around so Pete can see. It’s a review of one of her recent shows, but Pat’s scrolled down past the main body of text. She’s in the comment section, a practice Pete would never recommend but would also never stop herself from doing. It’s full of shit—about the strange, experimental texture of the music, about Fall Out Boy fans hating it, about how the band never should have broken up. But more than anything, as usual—the comments are about her appearance. Somewhere near the top, someone’s posted _WE LIKED YOU BETTER FAT_ , and the other goblins of the internet took up the call, so that most of the negative comments further down the page echo the same ugly words. It sears into Pete like every moment of shame and squirm she’s felt about her own thicker body, folding at the hips when she bends, soft and heavy at the chest, round where she’s accustomed to concave. _We liked you better. Fat, fat, fat._ Only no one likes Pete better now. Not even Pete.

“ _Fuck_ them,” Pete whispers, empathy (or maybe it’s rage) setting fire to her skin. “I am so sorry, babe. I will personally take a baseball bat to each person who even mentions your weight—” 

Pat flaps her hand at all of that, like Pete’s missing what’s important. “No, no, compared to the shit people usually say about woman performers, this is basically body positivity,” she says. “But no one’s even talking about my songs! They’re just comparing them to Fall Out Boy and complaining about my _haircut_. Ugh. Do you think if I was a man people would at least insult my goddamn _music_ , and leave my body out of it?”

“Well, I think Porcelain is a little weak, compared to the other tracks,” Pete volunteers. “Like. Not your best writing, coming from someone who knows. I wouldn’t have opened with it.”

Pat blinks at her across the table. “Are you—what are you doing?”

Pete shrugs one shoulder, not able to keep the beginning of a grin off the corner of her lips. “Insulting your music, babe. You look great, but boy, do I ever have notes on your record—” 

By the end of her sentence, Pete’s laughing, and Pat is out of her chair smacking Pete’s shoulders. “Oh my god, you absolute bully, _stop_ ,” she’s laughing too. Pete pulls Pat into her lap and Pat kisses her upturned mouth. “You are a jerk,” Pat informs her.

Pete hugs her skinny girlfriend close. “They’re going to have shit to say about your body no matter what you do,” she reminds Pat. They both already know it. “That’s the job, Spitfire. The game is rigged so girls can’t win it.”

Pat relaxes against her chest, sighs. “How did you stand it?”

“I made it my job to protect you. You, and Andy, and Jo.”

Pat nuzzles against Pete’s cheek. “Okay, so how will _I_ stand it?”

“Bronx needs at least _one_ rock star parent. You gotta get up on stage and show her there’s nothing to be afraid of, nothing she can’t grow up and do. That girls own the stage, all of creation, and sound itself.”

“You said ‘parent’.”

“Well, yeah. What did you think you were?”

“A weird gay aunt who keeps missing dinner?”

“I hope you don’t believe that,” Pete scolds. Then, because she’s too happy to think, she says, “When we live together, you’ll see. She’s claimed you like the feral cat she is. You’re ours, and we belong together.”

“Do you think it’s as easy as that?” asks Pat. There’s something in her eyes Pete can’t understand, because Bronx was born of her body and laid at her breast and no one has ever questioned their innate belonging, each to the other. “I can just—want to be her parent, and then I am?”

“Well, yeah,” Pete says again. “Bronx is lucky there are so many adults who have made that commitment to her.”

Pat shakes her head. “I don’t think it works like that. I think it has to be… earned. Or something. I think it’s up to Bronx.”

Pete takes hold of Pat’s jaw and kisses her, sudden and hard, like she doesn’t know how else to impress her meaning upon this girl. “Bronx is two years old,” Pete says. “If you want to be her parent—you just have to _do_ it, Pat.”

Pat blinks at her, face stern and slightly helpless with a frown. She’s not convinced, but Pete doesn’t know what else to say. _Being_ a parent is not easy, but becoming one? That was the effortless part. She didn’t even mean to. She just followed her heart and ended up here. 

“Trust me,” she says, kissing Pat with urgent force. “Trust me about this.”

Quiet as a whisper and ridged with pain, Pat says, “I’m trying.”

“Yoda wouldn’t think much of that attitude.”

Pat laughs at last, and kisses Pete properly. “Bronx. I am your parent,” she intones. “Better?”

“Much,” says Pete. And for the first time in a long time, she feels like maybe things will turn out all right.

Of course Pete insists on hosting the Truant Wave release party. _It’s easier to plan a party when your girlfriend sticks with the release date she tells you instead of using guerilla tactics to disseminate songs,_ Pete’s been complaining, but really she loves this kind of shit. The glitter and dazzle and rushing sense of self-importance, party guests and long dresses, waiters with trays of coupe glasses and mini mac and cheeses, live music and so many of their friends under the same roof. She hopes her wedding is like this, whenever she convinces Pat to marry her. 

Okay, _prime_ example of the kind of thought she’s trying not to have. She tugs at her dress as discreetly as possible, trying in vain to stop it from sliding down her boobs. They don’t have the Allen Iverson vertical lift they used to. At least her belly will stop it from falling _all_ the way off her: small, portly, and firmly situated over her uterus, Pete’s pretty sure this new shape is hers for life. It’s hard to imagine feeling less sexy, even in this long black tube of glitter she’s wearing. She’s stopped shaving, more out of a larger giving-up than as any kind of deliberate political decision; hasn’t bothered to get her curls pressed in months; and can’t remember the last time before tonight she wore makeup. She only ever really feels beautiful these days when Pat’s hands are on her. 

So she’s frizzy and fat as she appears before her larger assembled social circle for the first time in, well, months—release parties for other people and one disastrous attempt at DJing are the only times she’s even appeared publicly this year, and of course Ash has a date, and she’s eight years younger than Pete based on the leanness of her upper arms, and she’s breathless and dewy as a column of sunlight wrapped in clinging velvet. Pete feels no particular way about this. Truly. 

While Pat was touring bars and nightclubs up and down the length of California last month, Ash saved Pete a whole lot of trouble and told her what she’s balked at saying. _I love you so much, and you’re my family,_ he said. _We’re great as parents and I think we always will be. But Pete. As a marriage, I don’t think this is working._

Pete, a coward, struggled against hearing her own thoughts fall from another tongue. How long had she been pushing those thoughts down, hating her disloyal heart for holding them? To hear them from Ash’s mouth felt violent. _What are you talking about?_ she said, unvaliant. _This is a win for polyamory and nontraditional family structures. The split custody thing is totally working._

Ash knows her better than that, though. Always has, which maybe she should have given him more credit for. He caught her upper arm and she stared down at the spot where his fingertips indented her skin. _I think you should move out_ , he said. _The connection we have isn’t a romantic one, and you can’t pretend we make each other happy. Just say it, Pete. Stop trying so hard and say what you mean directly for once._

And so Pete confessed: _I want to get divorced._

So here she is falling out of a cocktail gown with a ring on her finger that doesn’t mean anything but metal anymore, gliding through a gathering of music’s best and brightest ( _one of these things is not like the others_ ), drinking champagne freely for the first time in ages because Bronx is finally, finally weaned off breast milk. And she’s here to celebrate Pat. And she’s quivering with want for a whole new kind of life when she hasn’t even finished this one yet. And she has no idea how to tell Pat she’s getting divorced and she has no idea how to do it without changing things between her and Pat. It’s not like she slipped on a banana peel and tumbled into accidental monogamy. There’s something specific she wants from Pat, and it is very much built out of _not sharing_. 

And that’s when Pat comes up to her, floaty and grinning and drunk in a flame-red suit, bowtie loose with debauchery around her throat, with Bebe Rexha spilling out of her short, tight-as-wet-paint slip dress on her arm. Pete swallows part of her lung, chokes on champagne.

“Pete, there’s someone special I want you to meet,” Pat gushes, rosy-cheeked and red-lipped, and Pete is convinced she’s about to say _I want to start dating Bebe_. It makes sense: Bebe is musically relevant, up-and-coming, a woman with a career and a future in the scene, just like Pat. She is also dead sexy, skinny as any woman who’s never given birth, with a face like a doll that stares judgmentally out the window of a vaguely creepy toy shop. The kind of doll that wears a fancy Southern hat. With a bow under the chin. Okay, it’s possible Pete’s drunk too. It’s possible Pete’s panicking. It would be perfectly acceptable, and even encouraged, in the stated terms of their relationship for Pat to date other women. (Or men. Or nbs. Or anybody.) God, Pete wishes she’d been brave enough to talk to Pat about what’s been happening in her marriage. In her lack of marriage. Pete wishes she hadn’t tried to carry all of this alone.

“Bebe, this is my true love Pete,” Pat’s blazing on merrily. Her hands are _all over_ Bebe’s toned arms and slender shoulders. “Who you may know from, um, general ignominy. Pete, this is your dream girl.”

Now Pete’s brain skitters sideways like a large, chitinous beetle startled by the light. Pat is… setting her up with another woman? To fulfill the emotional needs that have been scaling up and up and up lately? To stopper Pete’s loud, slightly angry loneliness while Pat devotes ever-more time to the studio and the road?

Bebe sticks out her hand and giggles. “Well, _enchante_ , I suppose,” she says charmingly. 

Pete bends over and kisses Bebe’s lavender-and-sea-salt hand numbly. “I have been dreaming lately,” she says. The words feel hollow on her lips. 

“Pete, Bebe’s been dying to meet you,” Pat’s saying. She looks so fucking pleased with herself. Pete empties her champagne flute down her throat, weighs the relative merits of vomiting. “She’s been looking for someone experienced—she can _sing_ , Pan. She’s perfect for you.”

“I didn’t know I was in the market for a replacement you,” Pete says, her voice coming out gruff, and Bebe’s made-up face falls, just a little. 

Pat leans in on the pretense of kissing Pete’s cheek, whispers obviously in her ear, “Stop being _weird_. Don’t pretend like you haven’t been miserable with me in the studio.”

“Everyone thinks I’m pretending lately,” says Pete. “Well, tonight is the end of pretend. Pat, I—”

Bebe interjects, “That would be a great single, wouldn’t it? _The End of Pretend_. I was thinking a stripped-down, electronic sound. Dancy, like the other stuff you have on Decaydance? Of course I can’t imagine how busy you are running the label—if you don’t have time for a project, I’ll understand completely—but Pat told me you’ve been dying to make music again, so I thought… it would be worth asking.”

Bebe’s enthusiasm has totally flagged by the time she falls silent, probably because Pete’s staring at her open-mouthed with stupid realization. “You’re talking about music,” she says to Bebe. To Pat she says, “You want to set me and Bebe up… to make music together?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Pat says, exasperated.

“And no one’s having sex with her,” Pete clarifies. Definitely drunk, then.

Bebe looks from Pat to Pete, bewildered. “Uh, I don’t know how your label works, but I definitely wasn’t planning on having sex with either of you,” she says.

“I am so sorry,” Pat says to her friend. “Pete is—this is just—”

“A big misunderstanding,” Pete interrupts, “by an insecure girl. Bebe, I would love to talk more about collaborating with you. Call my label on Monday and set up a meeting, okay? I’ll take you out for lunch and make this up to you somehow. Pat—come with me.”

Pete drags Pat by the wrist out of the party, down a back stairwell towards the floor below the space she’s rented, the one with life-size oak trees with fireplaces built into them, a balcony overlook with a secret Tiki bar one must utter the password to enter, large taxidermied animals poised just-so behind deep leather couches. Los Angeles is a wonderland. Guests hoot as she pulls Pat behind her, or maybe it’s Pat hooting—the girl clearly expects this to be an urgent make-out rendezvous, collarbone hickeys and sequined groping and hiking up dresses—but Pete, Pete feels like all her secrets have turned to bile and she’s going to burst. If she doesn’t speak, _now_ , all her unspokens will turn into insects and frogs and writhe out of her mouth, dropping from her lips slimy and many-legged. Girls who don’t use their voices get cursed to lose them. Or is that girls who use them too much?

She stumbles onto a landing, dusty carpet and spindly banister and gold-and-mirror walls, and Pat pounces on her, her hands on Pete’s shoulders like gravity, like all that’s holding Pete together, and she’s biting Pete’s lip in a way that would be _so super hot_ if only Pete was as drunk as she is, and Pete is so fucking nauseous it’s like she’s preggo all over again, and she just spews it:

“I’m leaving Ash.”

But once started she can’t stop. Pat freezes, breathing slightly hard, lips parted so near to Pete’s, and Pete fills that space with words, words, words. “Or maybe that’s not true. Maybe he’s leaving me? I think we’re leaving each other, at the same time. Like mutually assured destruction. Like the nuclear holocaust after a marriage. No, it’s not like that. We’re just—we’re not—um, can you take your hand off my tit for a minute? I’m trying to tell you I’m getting divorced and I’m terrified you won’t want me, like all of me, like without someone else to—absorb some of—like, be a buffer for—” Pete sort of gestures to all-of-herself with a limp hand. “This.”

There is nothing in the world Pete needs more than Pat’s answer. Pat is staring at her, all flushed and pretty and taken entirely off guard, and seconds of her silence feel more like centuries.

“Are we interrupting something, lovebirds?” an all-too-familiar voice interrupts from the bottom of the stairwell. Pete and Pat spring apart, exactly like their love is still a dirty secret, and look down to see Jo and Andy grinning up at them. 

“Surprise?” says Andy. “We didn’t want to miss your big party.”

“Even though Pete didn’t invite us,” Jo is quick to add.

Pat peels off from Pete effortlessly, like it costs her nothing. She bounds down the stairs as her friends come up it, and they meet somewhere in the middle in a big, messy hug. Pete stays where she is, using the wall to support her suddenly weak legs. She tells herself it’s not symbolic, Pat bounding away from her. This was a stupid time to have this conversation anyway. She’s shaking. God, why is she shaking? Should’ve worn something with sleeves, it is the fucking _winter_.

Then Jo catches Pete’s eye over Pat’s shoulder. “Dude,” she says, beckoning. “Get your lovely butt down here and let me hug you.”

So Pete goes, and her friends’ arms are the shape of solace. She doesn’t have the conversation she’s been meaning to, doesn’t get any answers from Pat. But she’s said the words out loud, now, and the ribs of reality creak and expand to accommodate this new truth. She’s not afraid anymore, of getting trapped in the labyrinth, the arranged-marriage bride of the minotaur. Her friends are here. They’ve never made her do it alone.

Andy hates L.A., so they pile into Pete’s car—four adults and a baby—and drive north, trading palm trees and concrete, star-studded boulevards for mountains, bluffs, and pines. Pat sits beside Pete in the passenger seat without discussion, like they belong together, and Pete takes comfort in that fact. Her hand strays to Pat’s thigh from time to time, and Pat looks at her and flashes a smile, but she doesn’t take Pete’s hand and hold it, doesn’t reach over and squeeze Pete’s thigh back. Their cryptophasia seems broken. Their nonverbal, psychic exchange of complexities is stuck in this loop, hand-to-thigh-and-back-again, which yields no deeper meaning.

In the backseat Jo plays different songs over the Bluetooth, and she and Andy and Pat take harmonies and sing, and Bronx burbles with complete delight in her carseat. Mom’s not nearly so much fun as a backseat packed with an aunt and auncle.

Pete’s car dips through valleys, long and low and green, packed with cows and farmland. Trailers for farmhands butt up against middle-of-nowhere mansions for subsidy-rich agriculturists. It crawls up mountains and winds through bluffs. As they creep higher into the country, the scene outside the car window turns to gnarled, knobby trees, pastures for multicolored sheep, jutting and climbing rock splashed over with riotous green. You can’t see around the next bend in the road but you don’t need to. You could disappear out here and you’d never feel it. This is how people get lost in Faerie.

In the cupholder, Pete’s phone vibrates with inspiration: texts from Bebe. Snippets of lyrics, descriptions of aesthetics, the fetal bones of songs. She turns the phone to face away, because not even Pete Wentz will text while driving with her daughter in the car. Just touching it makes her fingertips tingle, like music is electricity and the way she’s been feeling all this time is just her batteries running dry. What an idea: maybe none of this means anything permanent about her after all. Maybe nothing does.

When they’re up in the mountains, they park their car at their rental cabin and walk out towards the sky. Pat, fit and shapely, surges ahead on the trail with Andy, leaving Pete behind to huff for breath and watch Pat’s butt (smaller than Pete likes it but still exquisite). Jo hikes slow with Pete, holding Bronx’s toddling hand so she doesn’t wander off a cliff in the course of her mission to Examine Every Rock. Jo and Pete haven’t spent much time together, one on one, since Pete blew up their band. The one they started together out of nothing. Well, nothing but Jo’s determination.

Watching Jo fawn and coo over her daughter makes her edges seem softer to Pete. Or maybe time has softened her anger and her pride into ease and grace.

Maybe Jo’s thinking about the same thing, because she catches Pete looking at her. Kneeling beside Bronx, who has discovered a tiny pyramid of deer poo, she looks up at Pete from under a flop of curly hair. “You know I’m not big on apologies, Wentz,” she says conversationally.

“I really miss you,” Pete blurts out.

Jo’s face has sunrise shining out of it. She laughs. “Honestly? The feeling is not mutual.”

It’s so sudden and stunning and cruel, Pete starts laughing too. Jo hurries to add, “Not like that! I mean, I love you, you’re my sister, not like bunk beds and birthday cake but like how Gorgons are sisters. Together we are made of snakes and violence, and we turn all onlookers into stone.”

“Fuckin’ poetry,” Pete declares.

“But making music without you feels really good,” Jo says seriously. “You have been standing on top of my ambition in spike-heeled boots since I was 17 years old. And you’re so big and loud and self-absorbed and beautiful, _and good at it_ , that sometimes I hated you. Even after the band split—all the press was about you and Pat and polyamory, all the speculation about what led to the hiatus was just, like, journalists jacking each other off about _you_ —with that hideously ugly profile of me NME ran, that shit should have filled gossip mags for centuries, you know? The Resentment of Jo Trohman Killed Fall Out Boy. But they wrote me out as usual. They wrote me and Andy out. You hurt my feelings every day for, like, most of a decade, and you didn’t even do it on purpose! And you were my _best friend_. I don’t think I even realized how much that sucked until I had some distance from it.”

“Sucked,” Bronx echoes happily, offering a piece of deer shit to her aunt. Jo respectfully accepts the pellet and lets it rest in her palm.

Pete is having a peculiar experience. It feels—good, to finally hear all the things she knows she deserves to hear. Why she’s been avoiding Jo, thinking Jo’s mad at her, she no longer remembers. The recriminations she’s filled in the blanks on were all a thousand times more nauseating than the actual words Jo has to say. She keeps waiting for these words to hurt, but she has hurt herself so much worse in anticipation. Her mortified flesh cannot even sting.

“The beautiful thing about being in a band without you,” Jo says, “is that it made me realize I don’t care.”

“Um, ow?”

“I mean it,” Jo says. She flings the poop off the side of the cliff and scoops Bronx up in her arms, starts trudging up the trail after the receding backs of their friends. “I thought Fall Out Boy was my entire identity, the story of my life. Everything I was and everything I’d ever accomplish. And, no offense, but you took it from me. Pete, I was so mad at you. Since our first platinum single I’ve been mad at you. Pat too—that b-word never let me write anything! I was just this shitty punk girl and all I wanted to do was, like, write songs on my guitar with my friends.” Bronx is burbling cursewords and Jo swoops in to kiss all over her cheeks, making the toddler shriek with delight, a sound that raises birds from the trees around them. “And now I get to do that. Without you I realized I’m so much more than Fall Out Boy. And that realization has _truly_ allowed me to chill the fuck out.” 

Pete stops, then, in the forest, on the mountain, and really _looks_ at Jo Trohman. She stands the same way she did at 17: the tallest of them, confident in such a careless way that you know she’s not even aware of it, that the reason it’s so effortless is because she’s simply never questioned herself, fierce and unapologetic with a corona of belligerent curls haloing her head. Her face is angular and stern, beautiful in the classical, planed way of Grecian busts. Her eyes spark blue-green, a living ocean. Her cheeks are pink with exertion and spring chill, her face easy with joy, and Bronx is cradled on her hip by one casually slung arm. She’s got Docs on, because of course she does, and ripped jeans. The tattered hem of her Metallica long-sleeve is visible under her heavy flannel coat. She looks noble, somehow, outlined against the gauzy California sky. Our Lady of Rock’n’Roll. Pete’s knees twitch like the appropriate stance is supplication.

“Without you, there is no Fall Out Boy,” Pete says. The words snag in her throat with how much she means them. She feels sorry for herself, because for the longest time she thought that statement described _her_ , when really the story of her life, at 31-years-irrelevant, is that without Fall Out Boy, there is no Pete Wentz.

Jo’s face colors and she looks away, pleased. “I don’t think Fall Out Boy goes down so easily, do you?”

Something unnamed ignites in Pete’s chest. Something unlooked-for. “Josephine,” she marvels, “are you suggesting you’d be in a band with me again someday?”

“Absolutely not. No. Never,” Jo vows airily. And for some reason, to Pete, it sounds a lot like _yes_.

That night, Pete loses the big-spoon-little-spoon battle that two girls of equal height must wage nightly. Bronx sleeps on one side of her, tiny legs sprawled greedily over more than her fair third of the mattress, and Pat is folded in her arms so the back of her heart touches Pete’s front. Always in rhythm, they match their breathing.

“So. Divorce,” Pat says into the darkness. Pete jumps: she thought she was the only one laying awake. How many times has she assumed she was alone when Pat was right there beside her, waiting for Pete to speak first?

“I always imagined we’d have this conversation under the skull of a longhorn steer,” Pete says, panicking, describing the gaudy cabin decor in the same way a sea cucumber vomits its organs: as a diversion, so she can get away.

Pat bites her wrist very gently, as if to say _shut up_. “So are you totally over the institution of marriage?” Her lips brush Pete’s pulse when she speaks.

“ _It’s hard to say I do when I don’t_ ,” Pete quotes herself automatically. It is one of her worst habits.

“Ugh, that is your worst habit,” Pat complains. “Answer the question, Wentz. My heart’s kind of on the line.”

That same thing from on the mountain with Jo leaps fresh in Pete’s chest. Hope is spooling out of everything all of a sudden—chances and possibilities. She felt so trapped for so long, she kind of can’t believe the way things are opening up. She thought getting divorced was the end of everything. But maybe it’s a beginning too.

“Would you ever be in a band with me again?” Pete blurts out. It’s not the conversation Pat is trying to have, not the conversation Pete thought _she_ was trying to have, but actually, it’s the most important question in the world. Even more important than _will you love me, and only me, may nothing but death do us part_. Because maybe they’re the same question, and maybe they always were, and maybe everyone but Pete knew that already, because she’s always the last to know.

“Do I have a choice?” Pat snorts. Pete is deeply offended. “I’ll be on the road with you til I’m 70 if you write lyrics compelling enough. Thought you knew that.”

“How would I have known that?”

“I don’t know, by paying attention?” Pat turns in her arms, evidently just so she can roll her eyes at Pete, visible only by their white wet gleam in the dark. Pete kisses her to make her stop talking, and this works, but only until Pete starts talking instead.

“I feel like I gambled everything on my marriage and I lost it all and I’m scared I’ll lose you too. I feel so worried life is just a string of lonelinesses and no matter how much love is around me, it won’t be enough, and I will feel like this forever. And I don’t think I can bear that.”

Pete wilts with shame for saying it out loud. But Pat says, “Me too.”

This doesn’t make sense to Pete, because Pat is in her arms, and Pete loves Pat Stump more than herself, more than anyone, the same intense, possessive, infinite way she loves Bronx. How could Pat, the hot blond genius who has everything, including Pete’s entire heart, feel something as common and trite as _loneliness_?

“I am so jealous of the family you have with Ash and the way you are inextricably, legally, biologically tangled up, in a way I can never match, and how you are a parent by right and I’m just pretending, trying somehow to earn it, and I worry all the time that I’m not going to be able to pull it off and it just won’t work and I’ll lose you, and if you died suddenly I’d never even see Bronx again, and why do I even think things like that? Pete, I have been so jealous I’m insane. _I’m_ the one who’s been lonely, _you’re_ the one with everything she’s ever wanted!”

“That is literally the opposite of what is true,” Pete says, flatly stunned, and then the whole thing becomes ridiculous and they start giggling at the same moment, in each other’s arms in the dark under the skull of a longhorn steer with their daughter sleeping beside them. They kiss and laugh and cry and hold each other close, and it’s only when their sides start aching and their lungs are wheezing from the effort of staying quiet that Pat says, “I want you to marry me. I know how stupid that sounds. I know you’re not even divorced yet, and you might not even want to, and monogamy isn’t your life plan, but—”

Pete’s known Pat long enough to know what the ramp-up to an anxiety spiral sounds like. “Let me stop you there,” she says. Pat goes still and tense as marble in Pete’s arms. “You better not think that counts as a proposal. There is no way I am getting married again without a full-out, absolute fuckin’ fairy tale proposal. I’m talking Cinderella-style, down on one knee, iced-pumpkin carriage, royal ball with glass slippers, Jumbrotron at a championship Bulls game, romantic-ass _proposal_. If you’re not wearing a rapier on your hip and, like, tasseled shoulder pads, like a goddamn Disney prince, I’m not doing it. One shotgun wedding is enough, Stump. If I am _ever_ doing that shit again, I’m doing it as a princess.” 

“Counterargument: I’ve never been proposed to at all, by anyone.”

“Sucks to suck, Spitfire.”

“Meaning _you_ should do it. Ass.”

“Insulting me is a bad way to get me to propose to you.”

“Well, being insufferably spoiled is a bad way to get _me_ to propose to _you_ ,” Pat shoots back.

It is so unbearably fucking nice, laying there in the dark bickering about getting married. It feels like sharing a secret, sharing a life. It feels like happiness, and the space that will still be there when happiness fails or fades or collapses under the weight of life, which is too heavy sometimes. It feels like home.

Finally, Pete feels like she’s home.

“Me and Pete are getting married,” Pat announces, apropos of nothing, during the car ride south, back to the smeary rainbow sizzle of Los Angeles.

“Like hell,” Pete says immediately. “You barely even asked me.”

“I didn’t know you were interested until 12 hours ago, so shut up and give me a minute to plan,” says Pat. “I just thought that _maybe_ , if I told Jo and Andy something about our relationship, they _might have something to say back_?”

“Ooh! Double wedding, double wedding!” Pete chants.

In the rearview mirror, Josephine is maroon. Andy hides their face in Jo’s hair, since their own is trimmed close and slicked back. Because of the size of car seat, they’re basically sitting in each others’ laps. 

“I don’t even like her like that,” Andy murmurs into Jo’s neck, and Jo squirms under the movement of their lips in a way that very blatantly belies this.

“I could never date a straight-edge vegan,” Jo elaborates. “All I ever want to do is get high and eat cheese.”

“So you guys definitely slept in different beds last night?” Pat presses. “You didn’t cram onto one twin mattress, which I could hear squeaking through the wall all night, and leave the other bed in that room empty?”

“It’s cold in the mountains. You can’t waste body heat,” Jo says.

“After a lifetime of intimating I’m a loose woman—”

Pete adds, “You called me _the town bicycle_ once—”

“To think that the famous prude Jo Trohman would land someone as hot as Andy and _not even tell me_ —”

“ _Guys_ ,” moans Andy, holding their hands over their ears. They blush til every tattoo is shaded red.

Pat twists around in the passenger seat to stare at them. “Okay, here’s what we’ll do. I’ll start naming sex acts and you stop me when I get to whatever that was I heard through the wall last night.”

“Pete, drive us into the side of the mountain. I want to die in a fireball,” Jo begs.

“The Spanish dangle,” lists Pat. “Cunnilingus. The Flying Quim. Sixty—”

“Let us out and we’ll hitchhike. Just don’t make us listen to this,” pleads Andy.

“Tongue wrestling. Hand-holding. Fingering, fisting, footing!” Pat goes on mercilessly.

“That’s not a _thing_ ,” Jo moans. “Pete, make her _stop_!”

“Double wedding, double wedding!” Pete chants. Bronx, delighted by the playful shouts, joins her mother in chanting.

“I haven’t heard of that one but we should try it tonight,” Pat tells Pete. Andy moans louder than before.

“You guys know as well as I do that the only way this stops is if you _confess_ ,” Pete tells them in the rearview mirror. “And I really wouldn’t mind three hours of driving through mountains and listening to my girlfriend invent sex acts, so—”

“The sea otter. Mermaiding. Jellyfish oral,” Pat sings out happily, seizing on an upsetting nautical theme. The last one involves the type of hand motion that burns itself into the onlooker’s brain.

“We’re dating!” Jo yells.

“Dubba wedding!” Bronx yells back.

“Wait, are we?” asks Andy. “Officially?”

Jo, turning to them and blushing, if possible, even more, says, “Well, only if you want to be.”

“Yeah, no, of course, I just—you know, labels—”

“I mean we don’t have to—” 

“No, um, I’d like to—”

And in the backseat of Pete’s car, Jo cups Andy’s stubbly chin in her hands and kisses them, in front of Pete and Pat and god and Bronx and everyone.

Pat’s hand settles on Pete’s thigh and squeezes. Her cheeks glow pink. “Maybe the headlines can be about them for the next few years.”

“Fuck, I hope so,” says Pete. “Maybe we can get married while the press is distracted.”

“Get married, do solo projects, make a record together—if the press is distracted, we can do whatever we want.”

“I heard that,” Jo breaks off from Andy’s face for long enough to say. “Under no circumstances is Fall Out Boy ever getting back together.”

“You said the same thing about dating me,” Andy points out.

“Outrage. Slander. Lies,” says Jo, and then she’s kissing Andy again, probably so they cannot betray her further.

They could be driving back to L.A., or Chicago, or the goddamn moon. Pete doesn’t care. No matter what direction they’re headed in, she’s out of the labyrinth. Pat is beside her and the best people in her life are crammed in the back. Wherever she goes next, she’s going home.

Imagine Pete Wentz getting everything she’s ever wanted, then losing it—not just once. Not just twice. Three times. 

Three is a very powerful number. It’s also a lot of times to screw up what’s meant to be the easiest, most natural thing in the world: true love. But Pete’s never made anything easy for herself. There’s no sense in starting now.

Three is a holy number, a magic number, a cursed number. Three is stable from any angle, upside down or inside out—the strongest shapes are those with three sides. This time, she thinks, she has the foundation to build a strong and lasting family.

And of course she could be wrong. God knows it wouldn’t be the first time. This could be the kind of story that has a trick ending. Maybe she’ll risk it all again, devil may care how it turns out. Maybe she’ll light her past on fire and rise like a phoenix. Four is a formidable number too. Fall Out Boy proved that, could probably prove it again if they tried. She’s brave enough, now, to say it out loud. Brave enough to believe in _happy ever after._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote this story lonely, without the community of girl out boys around me that i’m used to. this happened because in 2019 i disappeared. this year me and my primary partner of 12 years got divorced, and this month my impossible, hollering, up-my-butt-constantly, perfect angel of a cat died after 16 long and beautiful years of life.
> 
> I have been happy, and I have been lonely. I have been heartbroken and lately i have been so sad, so scared. the past year for me has been a beginning and an ending. this past year I have been, at the same time, this pat and this pete. I hope something in this resonates for you, and if it does know that i am here and you are not alone. we can be less alone together, if you want. (carbonbased000, you have been my saving grace.)
> 
> thank you, always, for reading. I miss each of you. Girl Out Boy will return.


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